The objective of this work is to analyze the travel behavior of industry and commerce sector workers in terms of three variables groups: activity participation, socioeconomic characteristics and land use. This work is based on the Origin-Destination survey carried out in the São Paulo Metropolitan Area (SPMA) in 1997. Relationships were found between the concerned variables (Decision Tree), and the statistical significance of independent variables was assessed (Multiple Linear Regression). We analyzed the influence of the three variables groups on travel pattern choices: (A) socioeconomic variables (Household Income, Transit Pass Ownership and Car-ownership) affect the travel mode sequence; (B) activity participation (Study, Work) has an effect on the trip purpose sequence; and (C) land use variables (accumulated proportion of jobs by distance buffers starting from the home traffic zone centroid) influence the sequence of destinations chosen, especially in the case of industry sector workers. The different spatial distributions of economic activities (commercial and industrial) in the urban environment influence the travel of workers. This paper contributes essentially proposing the land use variable, through the intervening opportunities model as well as the presentation of a methodology, formed by application of exploratory and confirmatory techniques of multivariate data analysis.
travel behavior; land use; activity participation; socioeconomic variables